Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This chapter brings together some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s scattered remarks about emotions and integrate them with his more general claims about embodiment, mind, and self to illuminate his view of emotions. It argues that Merleau-Ponty defends an externalist approach anticipating current debates in philosophy of emotions. For Merleau-Ponty, emotions are embodied. This amounts to more than the trivial claim that emotions depend upon our brain and central nervous system. Merleau-Ponty’s view is, therefore, a kind of embodied externalism in that the vehicles of emotions span neural and extra-neural bodily processes. They are realized not just in but also across the body’s “expressive space”. Versions of this environmental externalism are found in recent debates about the scaffolded nature of affectivity and emotions. Merleau-Ponty appears amenable to at least two varieties of a scaffolded approach to emotions.